In September, Ares Rights directed three DMCA takedown notices to my web host, demanding removal of an entire post because it contained “private and not public data” — that is, an “address, email and telephone” — and “a document with copyright.” The complaint also implied that the post infringed on a trademark. The post in question, however, had redacted any contact information and the ‘copyright’ in question arose from a composite image created by a newspaper which contained the logo of Ares Rights.

Yesterday, Ares Rights 1 tried its luck again, complaining to Twitter that I had tweeted an image linking Ares Rights to (what appears to be) a DMCA notice to Facebook targeting a critic of Ecuador’s government — a notice purportedly sent on behalf of Ecuador’s state-owned television station ECTV. The complaint cited a violation of Twitter’s “rules regarding posting information or images that the individual claims as private.” Twitter suspended my account until I promised to comply with the rules, then deleted the tweet in question. That tweet and the complaint I received from Twitter are below.

The ‘private’ information consisted of an email address belonging to Ares Rights: a professional address associated with a firm purporting to act on behalf of the government of Ecuador. That email address is easily found on the Chilling Effects database of DMCA notices.

Twitter is, of course, free to establish their own rules and enforce them as they please. Their sandbox, their rules. 2 But Ares Rights’ invocation of ‘privacy’ is a fig leaf. The firm is engaging in a pattern and practice of cynically invoking laws or policies, whether in copyright or privacy, to attempt to harass and intimidate critics of Ares Rights or Ecuador. I’m not the only critic of Ares Rights to be targeted in this manner. Twitter has repeatedly yielded to these demands, so Ares Rights will continue to abuse them.

Ares Rights presumably sent the notice. Twitter does not disclose the identity of the sender. But what are the odds that someone else would be interested in a three-month-old tweet about Ares Rights? And what are the odds that someone else is dedicated enough to do this to multiple critics of Ares Rights? Given Ares’ record of invoking dubious policies to harass critics, I would be surprised if this were not Ares Rights. ↩

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I wrote about Ares Rights last week, criticizing (again) their use of frivolous DMCA takedown notices to attempt to remove content criticizing their firm or government officials in Ecuador and Argentina.

Ares Rights, answering my prayers, has now sent a frivolous DMCA takedown notice demanding the removal of my entire post, citing my alleged violation of Spanish privacy law for posting their address (which I didn’t).. That’s right: Ares Rights is using an abusive DMCA notice to attempt to take down my post criticizing their use of DMCA notices to take down criticism of their censorious DMCA notices. When you recover from reading that sentence, the DMCA notice (and my response) is below.

In June, I wrote about Ares Rights, a Spanish firm being used by Ecuador’s government to censor dissidents by way of meritless copyright claims. Their technique is as unproductive as it is reckless: Ares Rights issues a DMCA takedown notice — utilizing an American law — targeting material that is clearly a fair use of insubstantial content created by (or related to) state-sponsored media outlets. The offending material is briefly taken offline and then made public again once the targeted dissident (and the host of the material) catches on. It’s hard to divine what goal Ares Rights (and Ecuador) think this abuse serves, leaving only the conclusion that the practice serves only to harass dissidents.

In the court of public opinion, Chevron has pursued a comparably aggressive approach, launching “The Amazon Post“, a blog documenting in some detail the American case and coverage of it. The corporation also provided videos on its YouTube account, “TexacoEcuador“.

According to a post on its “Amazon Post” blog, Chevron notes that readers “may have noticed that our videos on The Amazon Post are currently down” (well, no: the videos generally don’t have too many views, which makes the takedown even more dumbfounding, because now they will get more views). Chevron says that their videos were removed from YouTube at the behest of a complaint from Ares Rights in “late November.”

The notice on the dispatched YouTube videos indicates that they were removed “due to a copyright claim by Filmin”, likely referring to Spanish movie website filmin.es, a corporation Ares Rights apparently has unknown involvement with. What content, exactly, filmin.es owns that was used in Chevron’s videos is unclear, and it’s possible — perhaps likely — that filmin.es doesn’t own any content at issue, and is simply being used as a vehicle to censor a critic of Ecuador.

If Ecuador Can Censor Chevron, It Can Censor You

Some may balk at the notion that we should be worried about Chevron’s YouTube videos, and may insist — perhaps rightly — that videos produced by Chevron to bolster its public relations should be taken with a hefty grain of salt. These aren’t relevant considerations. We value the ability to speak, not whether the speaker deserves to be heard or believed, irrespective of whether the speaker is a corporate behemoth or a lone pamphleteer heralding the imminent fracking doomsday. A government abusing the law — whether its own law or that of another country — to intimidate critics of any sort is a danger to critics of every sort.

Chevron, for its part, has something many critics of Ecuador don’t: the resources to make Ares Rights pay for its censorious transgressions by pursuing a §512(f) claim for their abusive tactics. Hopefully it will exercise them: it may not be a risk Chevron faces in the future, but it would sure draw more attention to the videos Ares Rights sought to memory-hole.

I’ve reached out to Chevron and filmin.es for comment. ((And sweet, sweet crude oil, which is probably a safer investment than BitCoins.)) I’ll update this post should I receive any further information.

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Amidst the furor over the drip-drip-drip of NSA spying allegations and rumors that Edward Snowden would seek asylum in Ecuador, Buzzfeed journalist Rosie Gray published a series of documents concerning Ecuador’s intellgience service, SENAIN. According to the documents, Ecuador purchased telephonic monitoring equipment and was monitoring the online communications of opposition political figures and journalists.

Ecuador’s Minister of the Interior responded on June 27, suggesting that the documents were a “fabrication”, although he conceded that Ecuador has sought to purchase surveillance equipment, which he bizarrely claimed had solved “100 percent of kidnapping cases.” He issued a further warning: “We invite the national or international press to demonstrate one single case of groundless wiretapping.You have 24 hours to do so, or you will be determined to be liars.”

This is not the first time that Ares Rights has worked at the apparent behest of Ecuador’s government — and possibly the government of Argentina — to attempt (and fail) to censor embarrassing media online.